"I'm not a stripper, I'm a burlesque ­artiste," claims the delightful Miss Polly Rae. It's a nice point, as the lawyers say. The word "burlesque" is clearly intended to lend a certain postmodern irony to the ancient art of ecdysis. Slickly directed by William Baker, part of the creative team behind Kylie Minogue, what this show really offers is an all-­female revue in which clothes are sedulously shed. Burlesque, though, it isn't.

To be pedantic, burlesque was a rowdy mix of disrobing and double-entendre that flourished in the US from 1900 to 1935. But the essence of it was that ­comedy was mixed with carnality, as proved by the literary critic Edmund Wilson in his account of a Minsky's show in 1925. A sketch about Cleopatra had Caesar entering on a bicycle, blowing a bugle and walloping Antony over the bum with the flat of his sword. And when the death-seeking Cleopatra cried "bring me the wassup", a slave-girl ­presented her with a box containing a huge prop phallus. Not exactly Shakespeare; but that kind of raucous vulgarity was at the heart of burlesque.

What we get here is a sequence of turns in which Miss Rae and her six ­acolytes writhe, wriggle, shake, shimmy and progressively undress; a good deal of ingenuity is displayed in finding excuses for this to happen. Initially, Miss Rae is an unusually revealing Mother Superior who sheds her familiar habits and even, controversially, tears up a photo of the Pope. Later, she becomes a mortar-boarded academic who delights in chastising her pupils as they sing: "O beat me." And, at one point, she is spreadeagled against a wall proclaiming "I'm really bad", while disembodied hands emerge from the woodwork although emphatically not, as in ­Polanski's Repulsion, with malign intent.

The striving for naughtiness is sometimes a bit strenuous, and when Miss Rae finally addresses us, she turns out to be a friendly soul. There is a hint of ­burlesque's bawdy origins as she describes an encounter with a window-cleaner, who soaped up her double-­glazing, and she shows respect for tradition when she does a classic fan-dance based on suggestion. All is lit and staged with the kind of cool sophistication one used to find at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. Some may argue the production is demeaning to women, but that view is hard to maintain in a world where male stripping has become routine. I wouldn't claim it's high art, but the show provides a refreshing alternative to Ibsen and is a rousing celebration of the female form.